Regular Expressions in Debenu PDF Aerialist 12

One of the powerful new features added in the Debenu PDF Aerialist 12 is support for regular expressions. Specifically, this is now built into the Create Keyword Links feature. So what are regular expressions and why do you care about them? That’s a good question. Well, a regular expression is really just an official-sounding name for a consistent, formal pattern of text. Examples might include SKUs, license, invoice or part numbers.

While Aerialist users could already save time by automatically adding hyperlinks to specific keywords and phrases, the new feature means that this can now be done based on types of expressions. Say you had a PDF-based catalog and wanted to create links for unique part numbers that consisted of two letters, a dash and five numerals (e.g., AB-12345). Prior to the latest release, you would have needed to manually link each part number to the appropriate location. With Aerialist 12, though, it is now possible to find and generate web links for any text in the catalog that matched the appropriate pattern set for part numbers.

To help users make the most of this feature, I have written a Knowledge Base article that demonstrates how to create links based on regular expressions. The basic take-home message is this, though: if you need to produce a lot of hyperlinks based on patterned text, then this feature is for you.